Review by Choice Review
The 1872 massacre of 36 foreigners by a lynch mob composed of native argentinos is the fulcrum for Lynch's lever, with which he pries open a vista of 19th-century rural Argentina. This masterful historian does not linger over bloody details; he finds it enough to record that the murders occurred. Buy why? To answer that, Lynch develops a multifaceted context in which xenophobia, spiritual impoverishment, conscription, and economic exploitation by estancieros all played a part in generating a rage that came to focus on immigrants. Legislation had turned farmers into peons and the unemployed into vagrants, vulnerable to imprisonment or long terms of military service. Often the conscripts had more in common with the Indian marauders they were supposed to fight than with the elites who consigned them, untrained and underfed, to careless death. The legacy of Rosas, violence legitimated by impunity, runs like a scarlet thread through this account of forgotten events at Tandil. Basing his work on records in Argentine national, regional, and local archives, as well as the Public Record Office in London, Lynch has produced an impressive history of an entire country in microcosm. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. L. Elkin; University of Michigan
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
